


all this space and we're still right here

by youngerdrgrey



Category: Queen Sugar (TV)
Genre: F/M, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-01-31 08:44:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12678429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youngerdrgrey/pseuds/youngerdrgrey
Summary: Keke says, “See, you don’t know art.” She means it as a joke, and Micah knows she does, but it stings just the same. // takes place post-212 and the festivalpromptedpleased + dark blue





	all this space and we're still right here

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Micah rolls his shoulders back, sinking into the pillows on his bed. “I don’t know. It’s like midnight, I guess.” He chuckles to soften the words, but he doesn’t have a better way to describe what he’s seeing in Keke’s painting.

She huffs on her end of the call, double-tapping the phone back to her face instead of the painting. “That’s all you get from it?”

It’s dark, and it’s like the night sky is peeking through the spaces in her crown. Maybe it means that the universe is on the other side of this victory, or that people contain multitudes, or that his girlfriend just likes painting the sky and her Brown Sugar Queen crown. It’s art. It’s not that serious.

“I mean, it’s nice. I like that you have the crown in there since you earned it. If you wanna let it inspire you further, then it’s cool to me.”

She glances out instead of looking into the camera. “Yeah.” Her porch lights draw shadows on her face. She rarely looks as serious as she does when she’s painting. It’s in the furrow in her eyebrows, or the set of her jaw, but her eyes will have whatever sort of emotion the painting’s supposed to bring. It’s pretty cool. “You don’t know art, though.”

He blinks. “I know you. Does that count for anything?”

She almost looks like she’s gonna say no, but then his mom knocks on his door.  He glances up from Keke to call out, “Open it!” Keke’s looked away by the time he’s back.

His mom peeks in with an apology clear on her face. “It’s getting late. Think you and Keke can wrap it up?”

He glances down at his phone. “Think we can?”

Keke nods. “Yeah, my mom texted me anyway to come back inside.”

His mom’s brows go up from the doorway.

Micah explains, “Sometimes, she paints on the porch, or the driveway. It’s something about the lighting and the air.”

Keke says, “See, you don’t know art.”

She means it as a joke, and he knows she does, but it stings just the same. Has his jaw jutting out. His words come out clipped. “Sure. Talk to you tomorrow?”

She seems a little confused, a little hesitant. “Yeah, of course. Night, Micah.”

“Night.” He clicks off the call so the beeping resounds in the room. He flips his phone over, sighs.

His mom’s still there, though, still watching. “You okay?“

Of course he’s okay. He’s fine. "I might not know art, but I know her. At least, I think I do.” But what if the art is a big thing? What if him not understanding why she makes the things she makes is gonna be like Aunt Nova and her break ups? Or his mom and Remy?

Everybody in his life is breaking up over misunderstandings and lapses in trust. He doesn’t want that for him and Keke. He wants them to be better than the examples that they have. He wants to have one girlfriend for as long as he can, and if either of them doesn’t want this anymore, he wants to get out before they wind up screwing each other up. How does he get there though? How do they go from talking about her painting to talking about how much she means to him?

His mom takes a step into the room. “You wanna talk?”

He started the conversation, didn’t he? “Yeah, I guess. Maybe.” He pulls his knees in so there’s more room on the bed. His mom crosses to sit at the foot of it. She angles her body towards him, and he has to look up to meet her eye since he’s still against the pillows. It’s kind of like he’s a kid all over again. Like he’s in his old bed, and he’s trying to explain to her why sometimes he feels weird when his friends say that he’s not what they expected him to be. Like the first time they really talked about race stuff.

Back then, his mom told him that some people would tell him that he wasn’t black and mean it as a compliment. Some people would say the exact opposite and mean the same thing, and it didn’t mean that he was any less just because that’s what they saw. He was the only one who could define his identity. The only one who could make the decision for who he is and who he wants to be.

She gives good speeches, but what example does she have for him with this?

She clears her throat. “So, you don’t think you know her?”

He shakes his head. “I know her, and I love getting to know her. I just wonder what happens when she decides she doesn’t want to know me.”

Mom blinks. She does that when she’s thinking, when her words aren’t forming into full sentences yet. “She’d be a fool not to.”

So Stella was a fool? A cheat, and a fool, and he’s the one who got kicked out of school for it. He’s the one who’s stuck in the same bullshit as all of the adults in his life. Everybody’s a liar. Everybody’s fake, but they pretend that they’re not, and Keke is the only one who doesn’t lie. But he lies to her.

“She doesn’t know,” he says, “about that night.” He only glances up to make sure his mom understands what he means. Her eyes go wide and soft at the corners, and he drops his back to his lap before he can see all the other emotion in them. If they get caught up in his mom’s stuff, they’ll never get back to his. “And I feel like the longer I go without telling her, the more it’ll mean when I do. Like, she’s gonna think it’s a big deal.”

“It is a big deal.”

He grinds his teeth. “I don’t want it to be. What he did, that night, was the scariest thing that I have ever gone through. But I don’t want that to define me, Mom. I don’t want that to change how people see me. I don’t want to be…” like the night sky filtered through the crown. He should get to just be the sky. Just be himself without it having to be anything else, and Keke is a lot like Nova. Keke wants to fix problems if she can. She wouldn’t let him let it go.

His mom puts her hands down on the bed. She sinks into them a bit, which normally means she’s trying not to get too close to him. It’s a thing that therapist suggested for her. Give him space.

“You remember when you were little, and we used to play astronaut on the way to games?”

He rolls his eyes. A little laugh bubbles up, but it’s because of how dumb the game used to be. His mom would put him in big coats and put headphones over his ears since they didn’t have a helmet. She would put sunglasses on him, and play soundtracks to  _Star Wars_  with lots of sweeping explosions and starry sounds.

“Yeah, you really liked space,” he says.

Her lips quirk to the side, and she admits, “I liked keeping you safe. For years, all people wanted to talk about was how young I was to have you. How the wedding and my pregnancy announcement were so close. How I must have –” She swallows thick. Her nose pulls back as her eyes focus on the wall. She finishes the sentence. “How I must have  _trapped_  your father so that I wouldn’t have to worry about money ever again.”

“I don’t remember that.” He remembers being at the games and bouncing with his mom. He remembers doing photoshoots and getting to throw the ball off his dad’s shoulders and a time before Rocky when it was mostly him, his mom, and his grandma. Mom and Grandma used to argue sometimes, back then, but it wasn’t about him, was it?

“I’m glad. I never wanted you to hear it, so I made up a game. And I thought that if you never heard it, then I didn’t need to worry too much about what they thought. Because I knew that you weren’t a mistake. I knew you were a gift and a product of love, and I refused to show anything else.”

Her voice sounds like it has to fight around whatever’s in her chest, so – “It didn’t work, did it? Trying not to hear it?”

She lifts her eyebrows in a shrug. “Sometimes. But it doesn’t change anything, to hold it in.” She clears her throat. “My point being that if you want to be seen outside of what happened to you, you have to accept that it did. You can’t hide from it forever.”

“So,” he sits up, “I should tell her?”

His mom reaches out for his hand. “You should do what helps you. What frees you.”

“What freed you?”

His mom grins. “I did an interview about being a young mother and how the mutual support between me and your father meant that he would make the money now, as an athlete, and I would catch up once my degrees were done.”

He shouldn’t laugh, but he does. “That doesn’t help me, Mom.”

She laughs too. “I confronted it.”

“You were bragging.”

She rolls her eyes at him, but she smiles at him too. Squeezes his hand and tells him, “You’ll figure it out. Now get ready for bed. Lights out, soon, please.”

He squeezes back. “Fine.”

She gets up and heads out while he picks up his phone.

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**Author's Note:**

> Do you think Micah's gonna tell Keke all the details of that night? Do you think he should?


End file.
